With states across the country facing serious budget deficits, it is important to remember our country’s tough marijuana laws aren’t just unnecessarily cruel to people who break them, but they are also devastating to our states’ budgets.

In Oklahoma, we have a mom who got sentenced to ten years in prison for a $31 pot sale. From NewsOK:

Because of $31 in marijuana sales, Patricia Marilyn Spottedcrow is now serving 10 years in prison, has been taken away from her four young children and husband, and has ended her work in nursing homes.

[...]

Starr received a 30-year suspended sentence with no incarceration, but five years of drug and alcohol assessments. Spottedcrow was sentenced to 10 years in prison for distribution and two years for possession, to run concurrently. She will be up for parole in 2014.

According to the National Institutes of Corrections, it costs, on average, $16,202 a year to incarcerate an inmate in Oklahoma. Taking into account inflation, if Spottedcrow ends up serving all ten years of the sentence, it would likely cost the state roughly $200,000 just to keep her in prison. Assuming a more likely scenario where she only serves four to six years before getting out on probation, the total cost will probably still be roughly $100,000. Of course, if she developed a costly medical condition that requires expensive treatment, the total cost to the state for punishing her for $31 worth marijuana sales could quickly grow by tens of thousands more.

These figures are just the cost of incarceration. It is likely that due to the criminal record and time out of the work force, Spottedcrow’s lifetime earning even after getting released will be diminished as a result. Over the next few decades, this, in turn, could cost the state thousands in her reduced taxable income and/or in added social services she will need as a result of potentially earning less.

In times when state leaders are facing tough budget choices, voters should ask themselves if they are willing to spend several hundred thousand dollars to punish people for use or sale of small amounts of a relatively harmless herb.

36 Responses to “Mom Gets 10 Years for $31 of Pot – or – How the Drug War Affects State Budget Deficits”

Follow the money, not logic. I don’t know about Oklahoma but in California the prison guards union was a primary supporter of the Three Strikes bill. That union was second only to the teacher’s union in Democratic Party contributions, which had a great effect on the then-governor Gray Davis.

The prison guards unions owned Pete Wilson as well. You won’t get elected statewide without them – Arnold being the only exception and he proposed privatization, which won’t remove the profit motive at all.

It’s disgusting! The 80 yr. drug war is what it has always been a race and class war. While wall st. criminals steal trillions destroy whole nations and not only walk away but get rewarded for doing it, this is where the f*cking focus of law enforcement is. It’s more then obscene it’s proof the rule of law no longer exists in this country, if it ever did.

Really follow the money and who is benefiting from the profits… CLASS WARFARE plain and simple… Make a harmless weed a class 1 drug and the prison industry makes ca-boodles of money keeping inmate for non violent supposed “Crimes”.. End the “War on Drugs” NOW should be our real aim… Would fix a lot of the budget problems ya think?

You say that as if its a surprise that a dem is/was corrupt. Especially in california. This really has to do with how woefully broken our legal system is in this country. If youre going to commit a crime make sure youre wealthy and connected. Otherwise kiss youre ass good bye.

Among the Native American population [in Oklahoma], 48 percent of those aged 18 to 29, 60 percent of those aged 30 to 44, and 39 percent of those aged 45 to 54 reported using marijuana during their lifetime.

The Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution, adopted at the end of the civil War in 1865, abolished slavery, but this same amendment expressly permits prison slavery and involuntary servitude.

AMENDMENT XIII – SECTION 1:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Are Americans more criminal than other folks? Or are there incentives that give the US the dubious honor of leading the world in prison population.

Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861–1865 Civil War a system of “hiring out prisoners” was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else’s land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery – which were almost never proven – and were then “hired out” for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads.

The tradition continues. The nation needs a way to fill the prisons which provide a source of cheap labor.

Depends on where you are.
In LA, good luck; even though there’s an ordinance covering medical marijuana dispensaries, the city attorney wants to shut them all down, using any pretext he can find, including hiring people to help.

Sure the prison unions lobby to not only keep the population up, but to increase the population as well. But everyone blames the union, when there are a LOT of other reasons as well:

-But the prison construction industry (and there is one) works hard to keep folks on the inside and keep those profits rolling.

-Plus the legislators with prisons in their districts work very hard to trade favors with others to get and keep prisons. And to keep the laws on the books to keep those district dollars rolling in.

-Then we’ve got the alcohol lobby, working to keep pot out of the stores. If people can buy a bit of pot, they’re going to buy less booze–and the alcohol industry can’t guarantee that if pot becomes legal, they’ll have the same monopoly distribution system that guarantees the high profits of today. A LOT of money flows from the beverage industry into politics, and keeping pot illegal is of the highest priority.

-Pot is used to control people. I’ve got friends who are cops in my town, and every day they are faced with gang activity. It’s really stupid stuff, like East Side guys coming over to the West Side, maybe tag a bit, then head home–and kids get knifed for it. So cops take ‘em off the street for anything they can find, or make up. Pot works. It’s easy, fast, and you can get the kids–who are completely clueless about legal process and their rights–to plea to a “lessor charge”, and bam! you’ve got a strike on their records, which means control over their every move through probation, and giving a reason to pick them up anytime they want. It’s a fully legalized police state and nobody cares because it’s “those gangers”. Of course often it’s not. One of my employees has been picked up many times because he’s a “known associate of a gang”, which translates as his brother once ran with some kids who might have been loosely associated with some guys who might have been in a gang. Oh yeah, they’re all Hispanic, but that must be just a coincidence, right? It’s that bad.

-The police also use pot to take down other criminals. Thieves and dealers of harder drugs can usually be found with a bit of pot on them, often more for sales. Busting them and the “hardened criminal” is off the street, with another strike, and less harm to the community. If marijuana is legalized, law enforcement sees it as taking a very useful tool away.

-Finally marijuana is the “third rail” of politics. If you come out in favor of decriminalization you are wide open to your opponents–every one of them–to paint you as a pro-crime, gang-loving liberal. Might as well burn one down on the steps of the courthouse. This is happening in my little town, as we are down to one city councilman who dares stand up for dispensaries in our city.

Of course it’s all stupid, but when you put it all together, you’ve got quite an entrenched force to overcome.

By the way, some of my customers are growers and they report that the price is falling because of so many growers delivering quality product–and because the dispensaries are being closed down. What’s happening in the background is a lot of small co-ops run out of the house, and a lot of delivery services. Things are changing fast in California.

In times when state leaders are facing tough budget choices, voters should ask themselves if they are willing to spend several hundred thousand dollars to punish people for use or sale of small amounts of a relatively harmless herb.

There’s a big difference between being a dealer and being a user. Take alcohol and tobacco, which are perfectly legal to use, you can still get yourself in serious trouble if you sell moonshine or tobacco in the manner in which she was selling marijuana. Because we are talking about a dealer rather than a user, even if marijuana was given the full legal status of alcohol and tobacco, they’d still be looking at prison and having a felony on their record.

In 2004, the state imprisoned more than 10 times as many women per capita as Massachusetts or Rhode Island.

The Women’s Prison Association reported on three decades of growth in the incarceration of women in the U.S., it cited Oklahoma’s high rate of incarceration as a prime example of the “tremendous” degree of variation among states. “Unless we are to believe that Oklahoma women are more than 10 times more ‘criminal’ than their Massachusetts and Rhode Island counterparts,” the report said, “we have to assume that criminal justice policy and practice are pivotal.”

Susan Sharp, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at the University of Oklahoma:

“You have the Deep South, Bible-belt fundamentalist, Old Testament harshness,” she said. “You also have the Wild West hang-them-high mentality. And then there’s the traditional Midwest conservatism. I think it just kind of coalesces into something unique in this state.”

It would seem to me that Iran Contra, Harvard and Haliburton/KBR, the drug trade, the war on drugs and privatized prisons are all connected. With the Bush family behind the wheel and the Clinton’s riding shotgun, the path that these honorable men have chosen seems horrific to me.

thirty-one-dollars….thats about 1.5 grams…that dosent qaulify anyone as a “dealer”. a 30 year suspended sentence? that person will be on probabtion for ther rest of thier life. 10 years for, less than two grams of pot. stop rationalizing that subhuman, right wing pig, judicial misbehavior

So what are the qualifications for being a dealer according to you? She was arrested by her own account for selling – not buying – out of her house, which she did this part-time. I’m saying whether or not marijuana is legalized, you’d still get people getting felonies over this since her arrest was for selling out of her house, which you can’t do that with alcohol or tobacco either. As far as the length of the sentence goes, I think it is way too long, but I don’t see her actions as not being felonies even if Congress passed a law legalizing the use of marijuana…repealing prohibition didn’t make it legal to sell moonshine out of your house.

Take alcohol and tobacco, which are perfectly legal to use, you can still get yourself in serious trouble if you sell moonshine or tobacco in the manner in which she was selling marijuana.

Let me have a go at this…

Moonshine is a process that takes natural ingredients and processes them to create an inebriating and potentially dangerous (to the health and even survival) of the consumer, plus it bypasses state and federal taxes on the production and sales of the final product.

Tobacco is similar in that taxes are bypassed as well as a potentially dangerous (again, to the health of the consumer) processed product is not regulated. growing tobacco is NOT illegal, but large scale commercial growth without a license is.

Marijuana is an herb that causes inebriation without processing. The state and feds do not regulate and tax it’s growth and sale.

It seems to me that this case would be similar to growing one tobacco plant and selling a couple of leaves to someone to roll their own cigar (without the physical addiction and carcinogenic aspects of the tobacco).

So the problem here is not that Ms. Spottedcrow sold a small amount of herb, it’s that the authorities have still been unwilling to face reality and used two excellent models for controlling inebriating and potentially dangerous substances and instead have selectively–and severely–prosecuted her for a minor offense.

Bah! But there IS no law allowing or regulating the growth and sale of this herb, so your argument is pure speculation. You’re saying that IF marijuana were regulated, sales of a tiny amount from her home MIGHT be illegal, and the offense MIGHT be a felony, so therefor this prosecution, while a bit too severe, should stand today.
That’s some convoluted legal argument y’all got there.

The very idea that possessing or even selling a substance that is less toxic by literal orders of magnitude than common OTC drugs or even likely alternative legal recreational drugs such as alcohol and tobacco could result in prison time is an insult to common sense. The arguments that cannabis should be criminalized are and have always been based on deliberate and transparently scientifically false assumptions, then promoted by appealing to people’s basest racist and xenophobic fears.

Imprisoning people for cannabis has as much moral and scientific basis as the Soviets using psychiatric cover for locking away people they disapproved of- just a nakedly ad hoc means to a morally debased end.

In line with the theme of following the money … It seems that law has been crafted to do nothing but protect large incumbent cartels (the design of the felony laws you point out) and to basically shift money between them with certain costs to or displaced to the society at large. Well, I think that needs to change especially if we have peak everything which includes peak artificial agricultural production also known as “peak oil” (see this article that discusses Spare Capacity Theory as an unproven consensus reality). Health and viability of the population going forward should be the concern, not protecting a handful of people organized as cartels and ensuring them their increasing profits despite the reality of a finite world of finite resources (i.e. there are more people on the planet now than in 1776). Also, I’d like to toss in for your consideration the distortions of what I dub “Big Genome” (essentially a subsidiary of Big Oil/Big Chemical) which I flesh out in my conversation with eCAHNomics in “Even in Deep-Red Idaho, Overwhelming Support for Medical Marijuana.”

Open your eyes. The point is, if it were legal she wouldn’t be selling out of her house. She would not be dealing because there is NO profit in selling Grams of legal pot. Your missing the WHOLE point!

It is not speculation. I live in California where there are such laws regulating the sale of marijuana and dealing any amount will get you years in prison and a felony on your record:http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?wtm_view=&Group_ID=4525
If she had merely been a user – without a medical marijuana prescription – in my state where it is regulated, she would have gotten a $100 fine and nothing if she had a prescription.

By the way, any time we are talking about laws that haven’t been passed, we are speculating. So you speculating about future decriminalization laws would also cover people dealing out of their homes is also speculation. However, I can point to NORML where they are very specific in that they address personal use and it being regulated:NORML supports the removal of all criminal penalties for the private possession and responsible use of marijuana by adults, including the cultivation for personal use, and the casual nonprofit transfers of small amounts. This model, similar to that recommended to Congress by President Nixon’s esteemed Shafer Commission in 1972, is called “decriminalization.”

NORML additionally supports the development of a legally controlled market for marijuana, where consumers could purchase it from a safe, legal and regulated source. This model is referred to as “legalization.”http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=3418#question1
If you think Congress is going to pass a law beyond what NORML is advocating, I’d call that major speculation.

Since no appeal to logic, justice or common human decency will be heard, it seems like the financial case against the drug war is worth a try. But it is American workers who pay for the arrest, conviction and incarceration of pot smokers. And it is American workers against whom the class war is directed.

The State ballot referendum is the only way forward. And even that just sets up a confrontation between the states and the federal government. State nullification of federal drug laws is slippery slope that could end in freedom from Fascist oppression.

I live in California, I have friends and customers who have been growing and selling since the day the proposition passed–and I know city council members who have been trying like heck to keep the sales legal in the city.
The issue, as you well know, is that almost every city and county in CA has been trying to find ways to regulate the sales to a very limited level, or even ban it altogether. The number of cities that allow dispensaries are few, and many of them have substantially limited their number and location.
This started out as intelligent response to the sales of pot–such as a minimum distance from a school or park–but has escalated rapidly over the past two years to outright attempts to ban all stores. There are lots of arguments used to back these bans, as you know since you live here and are paying attention.
Your attempt to respond to my comment by saying I’m thinking Congress is going to legalize the substance is dodging the point.
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Workingclass, note that California passed a ballot referendum and things are a complete mess out here, legally. Law enforcement and conservative politicians are doing everything they can to negate the measure, and the law passed to implement the measure, and it’s working. The majority of people do not see these efforts to negate the people’s will as something they need concern themselves with. Ask them if it should be legal, they’ll say yes. Tell them you are cracking down on criminals pushing drugs to the youth, and they’ll roll right over.

I don’t know the answer; I just know that prosecution and sentences like the one in OK are counter to humane treatment of citizens. And stupid, BTW.

I was a cancer patient not too long after the law was passed and I used herb for pain and sickness, to limit my use of prescription opiates. It worked, I got through my treatment without an addiction and no side effects from the pain drugs, and I’m thankful for the medicine that was available.

“The majority of people do not see these efforts to negate the people’s will as something they need concern themselves with.”

Yes of course. Nixon’s war on drugs proved that Americans can be stripped of their rights and they won’t say shit. In that way, the war on drugs has been like training wheels for the war on terror. The same people are not concerned about American war crimes. Check out Glen Beck’s Muslim madness. I am aware that the California experiment is fraught with difficulty but not up on the details. I live in (pray for me) Louisiana.

“Legalization” with its attendant tangle of politically motivated regulations is actually a poor functional substitute to decriminalization where cannabis remains illegal but the penalties are trivial civil fines. When I lived in Ann Arbor in the ’70s the penalty for simple possession under one ounce of cannabis was a $5.00 ticket and one was not subject to arrest or a criminal record if caught. If the maximum possession threshold were adjusted so one could grow a few plants in the backyard or closet to allow the user to safely decouple themselves from the criminal supply chain so much the better. This is in practice probably actually a saner and more appropriate way to deal with cannabis than the legalization route with its inevitable and likely onerous regulatory consequences.

I say keep cannabis illegal but make it completely and utterly not worth law enforcement or the justice system’s time or trouble to waste their finite resources on. Legalization/taxation is comparatively speaking a quagmire.

Interesting.
I was promoting a plan that would legalize cannabis in CA but regulate it along the same lines as beer.

The distribution and licensing–and enforcement–system exists today and would require only an increase in staffing, along with some specific new guidelines, to take on cannabis. It would work well, be simple to set up, and could be up and running (I think) in less than a year.

Application, approval process, licensing, inspection, setting up distribution, and enforcement would be directly along the lines of beer distribution and sales, using the (in California) the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board.

Also, commercial growing would be licensed the same as commercial brewing, as would transport, processing into other products, and distribution to licensed sales outlets.

Home growing would be allowed the same as home brewing–up to a set amount per year.

Everything would be taxed, all the way through the system, raising significant revenue for the state.

I really can’t see why we are still fighting this whole war when the mechanism exists and is so EASY to implement.

And I honestly think that if faced with such a tight legalization proposition, the majority of voters would say, “well, that makes sense, and it works for alcohol, there’s a system that addresses use by minors, so sure, why not?” and vote yes. Law enforcement would still hate the plan–they’ve got one more thing to enforce–but at the same time the cops I know hate the mishmash of laws they must enforce now.

I understand your point, but I would like to point out that moonshine can be poisonous if not properly made whereas pot has never created an overdose death. The tobacco law is probably just crooked to collect funds.